


Fidelity

by dorkery



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-11-13
Updated: 2011-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-26 01:26:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/277031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorkery/pseuds/dorkery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lipton lived the war like a soldier. And that frightened him the most.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a series of moments that capture Lipton's impressions and feelings as he goes through the war as he slowly comes to trust his fellow soldiers.

i.

Lipton remembered reading in school about John Clem, about how he had killed a colonel when he was 12 with his trimmed musket and his cap with three bullet holes in it. He had gotten those holes from the Battle of Chickamauga, a significant loss for the Union, where he had shot the officer clean off his horse as his regiment, the 22nd Michigan, attempted to retreat. They promoted him to sergeant after that, the drummer boy John Clem. And they let him fight in the war still, until the very last drop of blood was shed.

Lipton had pitied the boy, he recalled. He pitied John Clem for being a murderer at the age of 12, and for serving an institution that celebrated the murder through accolades. In school, he could only wonder how it must have felt to pull a trigger at a man, to watch him fall, to become an officer for that simple motion. A twitch. All he needed to do was to point his weapon at the right man. Shoot and run, so he wouldn’t have to see dead eyes staring up defiantly from a dead man, so he could keep his sanity. Maybe he didn’t even need to run; maybe a man falling down from gunfire was a man falling down far away, far enough that he could keep those eyes to himself.

Lipton almost laughed at how naïve he had been.

Textbooks and classrooms never taught about the suffering of fellow soldiers as they rushed to heal the wounded, watched friends and comrades die before their eyes. They never taught about the cacophony of cannons, about having to shout over artillery rounds, about watching men explode into tiny pieces as they lay crouched in foxholes that were covered in the blood of frostbitten fingers and the ghosts of dead men. They never taught about standing by a man and lying to his half-swollen face about how he would survive the war when a shell burst only seconds before would make sure he wouldn’t even survive the next minute. They never taught about how a man could kill

Lipton had killed.

Kill. Not murder. Kill.

It had been surreal at first – he expected John Clem himself had barely realised he had blood on his hands when he shot that colonel – to see a man fall, almost slowly, eyes wide, a hand over the wound, as if he himself could not believe he were dead. The Kraut dropped to his knees first, lingering before gravity took the rest of his body, head turning towards Lipton at the last second, that second when all sound was drowned out but the beating of Lipton's pounding heart. It felt like an age with his hands poised just so, rifle aimed down from that tree as he waited.

And then time sped up imperceptibly, those dead and fishy eyes he never saw glazed over and staring at Lipton in his mind, but Lipton didn't have the time to linger on one casualty when there were more Krauts he had to gun down. In his mind, he should have heard the beginnings of the murmur of _murderer_ but he didn't and for that, he was both glad and wretched.

* * *

Lipton vaguely remembered the smokiness of the jeep outside of Brecourt, the smokiness of the Aldbourne tavern, the smokiness of Ardennes. They were distinctly different in every way – stinking army food, and light and sound discipline, and relief; drinks, and cigarettes, and fresh-faced replacements; explosions, and cold, and frozen blood, and exhaustion, and death – but they all blended together in his mind, faces of the dead, faces of the alive. It was his job to know, to keep count, to make the reports, but in particularly idle moments, Lipton could see the faces of each of his men and could not tell the dead apart from the living.

This was why he was never idle.

Lipton constantly moved around, foxhole to foxhole, talking to his men, his soldiers, tried to keep them strong in the face of gunfire and loss. He memorised each story, laughed at their jokes, soothed them when they were wounded, because when his mind was occupied with them and keeping them in high spirits, he never thought about home or death or what he had become.

In the echoes of the small chapel of Rachamps, of the haunting cry of _Plasir D'amour_ and the soft scratches of his pencil against yellowing paper, he heard the voices of every single man who had died; in his arms, in his platoon, by his rifle. He heard them laugh and cry and scream for a medic who would be too late. As he held his head in his hands, shut out the whispers, he saw the vaguest impressions of what could have been a home once upon a time in Huntington, West Virginia. A wife with tender hands and a tender smile. A man who was a loner, independent from age ten. A boy who scraped out a living with his bare hands.

He heard a voice ask him then; was that his mother? Or maybe his wife? (or a nurse or a girl or a woman from Eindhoven with her shorn head) He couldn’t tell, and in some ways, he couldn’t care. The question was straightforward, but it hurt so much to try to begin answering:

 _How could you live this war, Lipton?_

 _Lipton_ , the voice had said, and the man’s lips tightened into a grim half-smile. Lipton. He could not recall being called anything beyond Lipton or Lip or Sarge, or even by any woman whatsoever (oh god he couldn’t even remember what his wife looked like anymore). He lived the war. He was a whole other man in a whole other world, and he was afraid that he was fractured in ways the shell bursts of Ardennes could not even measure up to.

Lipton knew how he lived the war. He just couldn’t bear to admit it to himself because the answer felt painfully inhuman to him.

 _murderer_

He rarely heard it, but when it came, it whispered in his ear incessantly, like an echo that grew louder instead of softer. At first, it meant nothing to him, like a word that had been repeated often enough that it lost its meaning, but Lipton forced himself to acknowledge the word, to hear it until he remembered everything about it. He let each jagged syllable stab him, curl into him like a tendril to drag out the guilt that was not forthcoming. He mouthed it, once, imagining the word on someone else’s lips, wanting it to _mean_ something to him. Lipton let it twist up inside him until he felt shamed enough to finally tell himself _no_. _No_. He wasn’t a murderer. He was a soldier. He had _killed_ (not murdered) other soldiers. Death was the price of war. Soldiers entered the battlefield ready to die. If it hadn’t been a Kraut, it would have been him.

Him.

Or Babe. Or Malarkey. Or Liebgott. It was survival. It was _war_. It was them or us.

Inside, though, he knew differently. He knew that, in truth, he didn’t care. He couldn’t care. The limp, lifeless bodies of Kraut soldiers made no impression on him whatsoever as he pushed through the battlefield. Lipton wished fervently that he _could_ feel sorry for Huntington and the life he had left behind; he was a son who would return caked under layers and layers of almost black blood for which he would be verdantly decorated, without an iota of sympathy or loss for the dead. But even the corpses of his own men have stopped bothering him. All he could hear himself think was, _shit, that’s another one down_. Another man dead. Another man unable to fight.

It scared him.

Lipton was afraid that he was losing his mind slowly, that all traces of humanity would slowly disintegrate and perish with each round he fired. He was afraid of how unaffected he was by death, how sure he was that he was doing nothing wrong by ending the life of another. Living on instinct. Like an animal.

It would be a wonder if he _didn’t_ talk to the men. Listening to them, making them his priority, it gave him a speckle of hope that, somewhere deep inside him, he hadn’t yet been consumed by the beast of war. Lipton hadn’t let the hairline fracture spread and shatter him completely. He still had a ways to go. He hoped to god he had at least that.

 _murderer_

As Speirs shot him a look from across the chapel, Lipton stood, roster in hand, unaware that his new officer would tell him that he was the most human thing Easy would ever have.

The word meant nothing to him at all.

 

 

ii.

“Look at me, come on, look at me, Murray! You’ll be fine! You’re okay!”

Lipton held Murray’s face in his hands, forced the man to look him in the eye as he stroked his hair back, gently but swiftly. He’d gotten shot in the thigh as they were taking Noville, and he was bleeding pretty badly. After what had happened with Hoobler, Lipton hadn't taken chances. He’d cut the fabric of his trousers immediately to expose the wound and yelled for a medic. Unlike Ardennes, there was a lot of light. Unlike Hoobler, the bullet hadn’t cut a main artery. No one knew that yet, so Lipton stayed there, tried to be as useful as possible to Doc Roe as Speirs crouched by them, taking out some fleeing Krauts with his rifle as he pressed up against a half-crumbling brick wall they were using for cover.

Lipton gazed down at Murray who was clawing at him desperately and looking into his eyes to see if he was lying, sputtering half-formed words, telling him how much it hurt. He hushed the man, didn’t stop stroking him, kept assuring him that he would be fine.

“Okay, you’re okay,” Doc Roe said with slightly quirked lips, relieved as he leaned back and readjusted his helmet. “Murray, we just gotta get you to an aid station. You’re okay. C’mon, Lip-”

 _MEDIC_

Lipton and Doc Roe exchanged a look before he took off immediately, running down the street, turning a corner and disappearing from view. Lipton’s mouth tightened as he heard the scream, hoping no one would die this time around. He needed the men to live, if not for the company, then for the selfish reason that he needed them to live so he could _care_ about them. He looked down to smile reassuringly at Murray who was starting to breathe regularly, took one of his hands in both of his own and patted it as he said whatever Murray needed to hear. The rumble of an engine broke his concentration and before long, he and Spina had loaded Murray onto the back of a jeep that was skidding through the rubble for the aid station.

He watched them drive away, just as the last rounds of gunfire sounded through Noville, brows furrowed at the prospect of having to deal with the thought that, if Murray died (which he hoped to god he wouldn’t), Lipton wouldn’t bat an eyelid. It felt awful to think that the men looked up to him when he was doubting his own genuineness. If he was killed in action, wouldn’t he want the men to remember him, even a little?

No. It was war. No one had time to reminisce. It wasn’t practical.

He tried to tell himself to stop thinking of useless things. He wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t _wrong_. He was a functioning soldier, just like the rest of Easy Company, and they were not _bad men_. They were upstanding individuals in a time of war, where values meant little in the face of death. Values changed. Like orders. He, like the rest of Easy he was sure, would be unrecognisable come the end of the war, because men who lived like the dead would forget how to live like the living. It was hard to explain such complex and almost contradictory sentiments, but it was true in every sense. Dead men had dead values. Soldiers were dead men until the end of war, when, by some divine providence, they would be resurrected and returned to a life they could barely recall.

Lipton suddenly found himself looking into Speirs’ eyes, dark and unreadable, the man watching him with a strange intensity that Lipton was only starting to get used to.

For a moment, he was taken aback at that, but it didn’t show on his face. He hadn’t realised that Speirs had approached him, much less stood directly in front of him. He felt a little ashamed at such a display of weakness – something a leader should never do, especially not in combat – and he was sure that the sheepishness was starting to show in his expression. He tried to think of something to say, but the words wouldn’t come.

In that moment of silence between them, he felt himself hopelessly lost in those unbearably dark eyes, black and cold, belying things that Lipton couldn’t even begin to comprehend, and he drowned in the sight of them because Speirs was looking at him and seeing things that Lipton wanted to hide away even until after death took him. Unsettling eyes that could pierce through a person and make him say things that should never be said. Force a man to do _things_. Lipton held his breath. He waited.

“He’ll live. Come on, let’s go.”

Lipton only murmured, “Yessir,” to a retreating back, following Speirs almost blindly as they walked into the city.

Immediately, he began to survey the damage, feet moving towards men both wounded and unscathed without thinking, asking after them and praising them for the resounding success as they spoke to him warmly. Someone joked about nearly losing his nuts, referring slyly to Lipton’s own experience in Carentan. They laughed. Someone else offered him a cigarette but he declined. He didn’t need it yet.

***

Amongst a circle of relaxing men, Lipton listened to staccato laughter and conversations, unable to help the sense of surrealism that engulfed him as he became almost hypersensitive in his awareness. He could suddenly detect each smile and grin and look the boys shot him throughout.

Whenever Lipton spoke, little though he said, they listened raptly. When he was silent, they regaled him with stories and anecdotes as though they hungered for his approval. When he gave them just that, for the life him (and he couldn’t believe that it had never occurred to him before), they _beamed_ in the subtle way boys did after being praised for getting a math problem right. It was no different than the countless conversations held of the aftermath of battles, but it was only then that Lipton realised what each wordless gesture meant. To drive the point home, as he began to exit the conversation, they offered him a cigarette.

Lipton didn’t know what to say. So he pressed his lips together and remained, declining.

As he lingered, not really listening anymore, he felt dark eyes on him, watching intently from a distance. Soft-spoken words in a candle-lit chapel slowly came to mind, meaningful looks and even more meaningful smiles haunting his thoughts with ideas of camaraderie and faithfulness, reinforcing everything that he had just experienced with his boys. His eyes fluttered, recalling words from only moments before that, words he hadn’t attached much meaning to as he’d focused on the faint whirr and cough of a rusty engine in the winter air, with a wounded man who wouldn’t end up like Hoobler and a medic who hadn’t been too late.

And then it dawned on him.

 _He’ll live. Come on, let’s go._

Speirs had meant to comfort him.

Lipton made to leave again, and another cigarette was offered.

 _He'll live_

For the first time, he finally knew what it really meant.

 _live_

It meant, ‘stay’.

Lipton smiled.

Slowly at first, but it spread into a big smile that eventually reached his eyes and nearly made them twinkle. He felt incredible fondness for his boys right then, the ones still alive, the ones clinging onto him and dragging him along the warpath to make sure he kept fighting just like the rest of them did. His smile didn’t waver in the least, and almost immediately, all the boys reddened, became sheepish, apologised for keeping him from the things that he had to do, his duties, whatnot. He nodded and laughed softly, thanking them for the refused cigarettes and telling them to save them for him on a colder night. He turned to walk away, aware that they had perked up without even having to see.

As he walked with Speirs towards Batallion HQ and gave him his report, he didn’t suppress the smile that had taken over, his lips thinning into a small grin at intervals where thoughts of repeated offers of cigarettes and beaming _boys_ told him that it was fine to live like this, that he wasn’t going insane or pretending to be human.

Lipton, in the end, did not correct Ronald Speirs for assuming that his temporary moment of loss had been for a man who would return in a few days with only a slight limp and a crooked grin. After all, he had only said six words, of which four had been instruction. Speirs had never given him the opportunity to assume anything of him except for wild stories of gunfire and POWs, and Lipton had never given in to those sentiments. He wasn’t about to begin.

Instead, he remained by his officer’s side staunchly, allowed Speirs to look all at Lipton he liked without pretending not to notice or feeling awkward as those deep, black eyes took all of him in and forced him to sort out the mess of feelings he had buried in his heart. Speirs' two words - "He'll live" - wasn't much of anything all at all, but they had filtered out the chaos of hundreds of days of blood and corpses. Lipton could survive Speirs for the sake of those two words which he knew, he just _knew_ , referred to someone other than Murray.

He met Speirs’ look with a smile, warm and confident.

The gaze held briefly until Speirs nodded, approving.

Lipton finally released that breath he had been holding.


	2. Chapter 2

iii.

Rachamps was hushed at night, with only a handful of working streetlamps and lights shining through windows of occupied houses accompanying the slight din of laughing soldiers. Lipton was just outside of town near the edge of the wood, far away enough that he could hear himself think, but not too far so as to be able to run down the street if someone called for him. He had placed himself on slightly crumbled steps, leaning back and vaguely gazing over the landscape.

Part of him was calm now. Before, Lipton considered it his duty to be with the men every waking moment, if not to direct them then to at least be a comfort with his presence. He had done it to overcome his insecurities; that the men would take his mind off home and everything that had been left behind. They had. Now that he realised that their relationships extended beyond that duty, beyond the insecurity, Lipton discovered that he didn’t have to sit by the men idly anymore. They weren’t so distant that he had to include himself in every little gathering. Bastogne had taught him about that bond. Speirs had reinforced it.

He heard the scrape of heavy boots approach, but he didn’t react.

“Nice view.”

Lipton looked up to see Speirs casting a glance over the town. He smiled mildly, not moving, greeting the man with a simple mention of, “Sir.” Speirs nodded simply, dark eyes fixated on a point in the distance. Lipton couldn’t help but recall the outlandish stories that came to mind – it wasn’t hard to associate it with a man who had such a cold, detached gaze and almost black eyes. He wondered if Speirs could see through men with those eyes, if he could look past their shields and into their hungry, lost souls, with every ounce of weakness and fear men held in their hearts. If he could reach in there somehow, wrench it out so a man could be as ruthless and efficient as he was, or if he could mould the fear into a kind of strength that pulled triggers and yelled orders. He knew how to shape fear, that was certain.

Speirs extended a pack of Lucky Strikes towards Lipton, looking at him with cool and unblinking black eyes.

“Smoke?”

He smiled fully at that. Ironic. He looked up at Speirs before he unhesitatingly took a cigarette, speaking even as he moved to place it between his lips.

“If I say yes, you won’t shoot me, will you?”

Speirs snorted, taking a seat beside Lipton and leaning in to light it. Lipton responded with a slow drag, exhaling in almost a sigh as the smoke thickened and curled in the cold winter air. He heard the shutting clink of a zippo and the soft rustling of clothing as Speirs pocketed it once more. Lipton closed his eyes briefly and imagined a pistol in his hand, cocked and ready to shoot. There was no gunfire, only soft but sharp words that rang in his ears like a shot in the battlefield.

“We’re leaving for Haguenau tomorrow.”

Lipton’s mouth tightened in a slight frown. “Moving out already, huh.”

“The men’ll deal. We’ve got quarters in Haguenau. Showers. Kitchens.”

“That’s good,” Lipton agreed. “That’s good.”

They were silent a moment, each man watching the lights twinkle in the windows of cracked buildings as soldiers shared their moments of respite together. Lipton felt those eyes rove to him steadily, remaining there, but he didn’t react. He was used to it now, odd as it seemed. He understood. Lipton took another drag from his cigarette.

Speirs didn’t look away.

“I… just needed to get away from the men for a while,” he finally admitted in response to the unasked question.

“Stress?”

“Everyone’s a little stressed,” he reassured. It wasn’t that. Lipton took a moment, sighing again as he laid himself down onto his back, gazing up at the cloudless sky, removing the cigarette briefly as he exhaled smoke.

“I’ve figured some things out,” he said, knowing that he was confirming things that Speirs had assumed, whatever they were. “It doesn’t make it any easier to handle.”

“You’re probably thinking too much,” Speirs replied, casting his eyes over the horizon again.

“Probably,” Lipton echoed before Speirs could say anything more. “But that’s not it.”

He tilted his head slightly to look at Speirs – the back of his head, his ears that were slightly red from the cold, scruffy hair, the slope of his back, the barest outline of his face illuminated dimly by the moon and village lights, and the steady curl of smoke that rose into the air and dissipated slowly with each steady puff of a cigarette. He could hear the man thinking, it was in the way he breathed, the way the air vibrated subtly around him.

“I function pretty well as a war machine,” Lipton heard himself say slowly, somewhat surprised at the admission, but even more so at the words that followed. “Sometimes a bit too well.”

Speirs didn’t react at first, but he turned his head to look at Lipton with black eyes that the sergeant could clearly read for the first time. Lipton would have thought absurdly that he was like a child who finally recognised what certain words meant, after using them time and again. The realisation that he _knew_ , this day, with the men and with _this_ man, but he was occupied with what he could see in those eyes.

Those eyes that knew exactly what Lipton meant.

A slow smile – warm and genuine; he’d seen it once before and he knew that he’d be seeing it a bit more somehow – spread across Speirs’ face, reaching his eyes, and he rolled the cigarette to the corner of his mouth with his tongue, expression both intensely clear and all at once amused.

“Are we having a heart to heart? Because I’m damned sure I’ve never heard you complain like this to any of the men, Lip.”

Lipton smiled in response.

“The chain of command works the exact same way when it comes to complaints,” he began, matter-of-factually. “The non-coms handle the enlisted men, and the COs handle the non-coms. In this case, that would be you.”

“Really,” Speirs lifted a brow, speaking in suggestion rather than questions, like he tended to. “And who do the COs bitch to.”

“You work your way up, I suppose. Looeys to Captains. So on and so forth. The General would complain to the President, I guess.”

“And I suppose the President bitches to everyone.”

Lipton tilted his head to fully meet Speirs’ eyes, giving him a slightly cheeky grin, something he rarely did.

“You catch on quick, sir.”

Speirs said nothing in reply. Lipton wouldn’t realise until later that he had been speechless. But it was the moment - every bit as casual and personal as a drink in a bar between two war buddies who had known each other since they were both in diapers - and they were both tipsy without alcohol. Loose. Relaxed. Lipton would never have imagined himself saying what he had to Speirs, to his superior officer, but Bastogne had changed a lot of things. The intimacy between soldiers, seniority notwithstanding, was something that he had learnt to live with, to cherish. Even if that meant just one night and two cigarettes. All they had was the assurance that there were no men around, and that Speirs wouldn’t shoot him over a smoke. That Speirs would never shoot him.

“You know,” he finally heard Speirs speak. “You’re really not as nice as all of ‘em say.”

“It’s probably just you,” Lipton chuckled, taking another drag.

Speirs snorted.

"Yeah."


	3. Chapter 3

iv.

“You ever think about home, Lip?”

Lipton looked up lightly to meet Johnny Martin’s eyes over the rim of his cup, steam wafting up from something that almost seemed like coffee if he pretended enough. It was chillier than usual. Martin huddled mercifully close to him, their rifles leaning against a tree both of them had decided to sit by.

“Home?”

“Home,” Martin echoed with a nod. “Y’know, wife. Kids. House. Picket fence.” He let out a snort as he mentioned ‘picket fence’, like he couldn’t believe he was actually saying it aloud. But the idea was there, even as he eyed the troops walking past, waiting for a reply.

“…Not really,” Lipton admitted.

Martin sighed, closing his mouth as he stared out at the men, eventually dropping his gaze.

“Not even you, huh.”

Lipton looked puzzled for a moment. Martin wasn’t usually nostalgic or ambiguous. It was a feature that most of the soldiers prized. Even when he had gotten the news about Guarnere’s brother back in Aldbourne, he hadn’t minced words with neither Lipton nor Guarnere himself. Skirted the issue, sure, but he was always direct.

“Johnny?”

Martin didn’t speak for a moment, pensive, hesitant. He was teeming with something he couldn’t put into words, something that both excited and frightened him. His voice, however, was oddly hollow as he spoke in a confidential undertone. It was dull. Almost upset.

“Tell you the truth, I… I don’t even remember what she looks like anymore.”

Lipton’s mouth went a little dry. He lowered his coffee to his lap, expression patient, waiting.

Knowing.

Johnny Martin was a good man; strong, clear headed. He acted like a staff sergeant should act, never revealed weakness, never brought down morale. But Lipton was a close friend, and above all, a senior non-com that most of the men confided in. It was a burden he had to bear, but he bore it with pride. Considering the number of times Martin had come to him before, Lipton could only guess that he had been troubled for a while. Perhaps he hadn’t discovered what the dull ache of worry had been until then. Perhaps he hadn’t known how to express his fears.

“Just that, the work I did and the people I was with… I guess… I mean, you and I, we both got, y’know…” Martin trailed off, staring at the ground, unblinking.

Lipton knew exactly what Martin was thinking. He knew what he wanted to hear.

“It’s okay, Johnny,” Lipton soothed, a hand already patting his shoulder gently, squeezing. “When you’re away for so long, these things just happen. Things change. People change. You’re fighting a _war_ , Johnny. And to be frank,” he paused a moment to make sure Martin looked him in the eye, saw how earnest he was.

“When we go back, nothing will ever be the same. And it’s _okay_.”

He saw Martin’s lip quiver, so very slightly. His voice remained steady, strong, but he saw the quiver and it didn’t stop for a while. Lipton empathised – Martin couldn’t know how close to home that had hit – but he could never admit that he had gone through the very same thing, the very same fears. He was a first sergeant, and first sergeants were supposed to be the unbreakable pillars of support of a company. He had told Speirs the night before that men looked to their superiors for encouragement. By that very principle, leaders could not reveal any flaws to their men. It was imperative.

Which was why Lipton never complained. He couldn’t. There had never been any COs for him to turn to before, not after Winters had been promoted, so he became used to shouldering the burden. So used to the burden that he lost the awareness of how much it truly did weigh, how much it took out of him day after day. The men could fathom the shape of it, could make out the silhouette of it, but never the density, the intensity. They couldn’t feel what Lipton felt. And to be frank, Lipton tried his best to not to let it show. He never knew that the men understood that need of his completely.

“It is, isn’t it?” Johnny Martin asked, almost (almost) desperately, accent coming out strong, pulling Lipton away from his thoughts. “It ain’t wrong, innit? Lip? It's-"

“It’s okay,” Lipton reassured him firmly, forgetting his coffee. “It’s okay."

* * *

"Do you think we'll go back someday?"

Lipton looked up, surprised.

He rarely heard Speirs talk about things unrelated to the war at hand. Nonetheless, the tone of his officer’s voice wasn’t wistful or nostalgic; it was firm, as though asking for an opinion regarding a combat patrol rather than his personal feelings. He didn't say anything for a moment, cautiously surveying the situation, the atmosphere, unsure of whether the question had been rhetorical or not. After a while, Speirs cast his dark eyes to the man, penetrating as usual, and by then Lipton had come to know that he wasn't doing that to intimidate him into saying what Speirs wanted to hear. That was just Speirs wanting an answer.

"Mourmelon?"

"No, Sergeant," Speirs’ eyes narrowed slightly, words sharp as always. "Home."

Lipton had the courtesy to look slightly sheepish. Speirs didn’t even blink.

 _Home_. That word was popping up a bit too much for his liking.

"Honestly, sir?” Lipton decided he might as well be honest. “I don't know."

"Yeah," Speirs replied, tightening his lips together as he looked away, his tone not matching his noncommittal expression. "Yeah."

Lipton shot him one of his mild smiles, this time one that looked slightly uncertain, and returned to the papers in his hand, not really knowing what to do from then on. He wasn’t particularly occupied with the new roster anymore, but he wanted to keep himself from being idle. And for some reason, his entire body seemed to weigh down on him, head the slightest bit foggy. He’d get headaches when he over-thought things, and so to remedy that, Lipton would generally try to focus on simple tasks until he had something else to do. He managed a few more minutes of silence before the headache began to creep up on him, grip him tight in a painful vice. He rubbed his temple with a bruised finger, trying to soothe it still.

"Lipton."

"Sir?” He looked up automatically.

Speirs eyed him, taking a moment before speaking.

“You’re fatigued.”

“I’m not,” Lipton protested immediately, hurriedly adding, “Sir,” embarrassed for sounding petulant.

Speirs arched a brow, giving him a look.

“You didn’t hear a word I said.”

“Well…” He tried. But he hadn’t heard. “…I wasn’t paying attention, I’m sorry. What was it, sir?”

Speirs stared at him then. That wasn’t something Lipton normally did. He allowed it to slide, but there was a warning glint in his eye that informed the First Sergeant that Speirs was well aware of certain things, whatever those things were. Lipton, however, barely recognised the look, mind starting to haze over once again.

"I _said_ , Sergeant Lipton, that I'm married."

Lipton's eyes snapped open.

" _What_?"

He saw the corners of Speirs' eyes crinkle, accompanying the amused smirk, but it barely registered. He had all of Lipton's attention now, brain up faster than a cold shower in Bastogne. Fact was that Speirs wasn't giving Lipton's brain enough time to catch up, and he struggled so plainly to take in everything he was being told that Speirs couldn’t help the smile that eventually widened on his face.

"Got hitched in Aldbourne. Widow. Husband was a soldier."

Lipton was at a total loss.

Speirs broke his pack of smokes then, idly placing one between his lips and lighting it before offering another to Lipton - to which the sergeant didn't move to accept nor reject. Speirs let his hand stay outstretched for a minute, expression unreadable, before bringing it back, removing a single cigarette and lighting it.

"She's pregnant with my kid."

He approached, hand stopping a few inches short of Lipton's face. Lipton finally took it with a reluctant hand.

"Congratulations," he finally offered, tone weak. Speirs shot him another amused smirk.

"I figured you for more of a talker, Lipton."

"Ah," Lipton replied gingerly. "Just that I figured you for... less of a talker, sir. All due respect."

"Suppose it seems that way," he removed his cigarette, exhaling slowly. He didn't sound like he believed Lipton, which made the man worry a little. Right then, he wasn’t sure why, but when he would be thrashing in a soft bed in a rotten house in Haguenau, he would know exactly why. "You're married, right?"

“What?” Lipton sounded disoriented, a bit tired, eyes swinging to meet Speirs’.

He didn’t respond, merely taking a seat and looking away, mouth hardened into a line.

Lipton wracked his brain, not wanting to admit defeat in this. He was by no means afraid of Speirs, but he did not want to be bullied into resting when he had to be awake for the other boys lest another Johnny Martin came up to him, to talk. He forced himself, think, think, think. Harder. On the tip. Of tongue. Important. Very important.

 _You’re married, right?_

Lipton felt like he’d asked himself this question a thousand times throughout the war. He knew the other men had asked this question not just of him, but of themselves as well. Remembrance. They owed that much to the thin strip of gold on their finger that promised a whole other world, a world of comfort and silence and the smell of women clinging to soft sheets. In other words, something no one knew anymore. Something that would never mean what it had meant a long, long time ago.

Lipton hesitated.

“...back in the States, yes, I was married.”

He knew, somehow, that Speirs probably thought that he was being nosy and that Lipton didn't want to talk. He could tell that Speirs, in that stilted, clumsy way of his, wanted to invite Lipton to speak, as candidly as he had the night before. Lipton wanted to. He wanted to so badly. But there was something inside him that forced him down, clouded his thoughts, made everything strange and imperceptible. He felt guilt, he felt nausea, he felt excitement, and it confused him. He wondered, briefly, why Speirs wanted to know. Right then, he was still an enlisted man – officers and enlisted men weren’t supposed to buddy up – and Speirs was _not_ the type to be intimate. But that notion passed quickly and his thoughts fell into further disarray.

Lipton didn’t know what the whispers of stars and cigarettes meant to either of them, didn't know about a lot of things, but he knew one thing: he didn’t want to shut Speirs out. He wanted to reach out, grab the man's hand that was being so tentatively offered to him. He was supposed to be Easy's First Sergeant, the man with all the right words, but he could never conjure anything when he constantly lost himself in black eyes that could see beyond the ghosts of a dream of freedom and how they shackled Lipton down. Black eyes that were cold and empty, but held _understanding_.

Now that he had finally met a man who knew exactly what his burden looked and felt like, Lipton couldn't let himself be overtly cautious and keep away. He didn’t want the burden anymore. It hurt so much to carry it alone. Lipton knew that he had to make a choice.

Lipton took a deep drag of his cigarette before he closed his eyes and laid his head back.

"...I'm... from Huntington, West Virginia..."


	4. Chapter 4

v.

The cold was biting in that lone foxhole, Hoobler’s Luger glinting dully in the thick of winter beneath his trembling fingers and the slow puffs of air that lingered before his face. He remembered cleaning it with hands shaking from the cold, wiping and polishing as hard as he could as a means to keep warm. To some extent, he supposed he had imagined blood on it, Hoobler’s, because he had stopped to stare, to realise that all that was left of that man on this earth, now buried in a shallow grave deeper in the woods where it was safe from all the shelling, was the barest traces of blood smeared on the weapon that killed him. His flesh and bone had been reduced to a few solitary red droplets that were frozen now, mired in the dirt between the crevices of the barrel of the Luger. Which Lipton was now wiping off.

Hoobler was dead.

It was nearly blasphemy, he thought, nearly unforgivable, and as he began to tremble again, he resumed the cleaning for warmth’s sake, glad for the softest crunches of snow behind him that would ask him what took him to Europe and what he had left behind and everything he never wondered about anymore.

Watching Malarkey toy with the gun was somewhat comforting. Lipton twirled his spoon idly, finding it difficult to swallow anything as his throat began to take a rougher, almost sandpaper-like quality. As the men occupied themselves with amusing exchanges over what they tried to convince themselves was breakfast, he remained quiet as he usually did, watching Malarkey figure out the Luger’s workings through touch and intuition. The bullets had been wisely removed this time around.

Lipton thought about the blood Hoobler shed which may or may not have splattered onto the gun, about how it may or may not be rubbing into Malarkey’s skin and blending with the very essence of his being. Ghost trails of blood that Lipton could taste and smell, but could never see, had rubbed into his skin over and over throughout the war as he collected dirty dog tags from the dead and he imagined what a burden it must be to bear remembrance for a dead man, for dead _men_ , who would never walk or breathe or smile again.

Amidst the raspy peals of laughter the living boys shared, Lipton caught Malarkey caressing the barrel of the gun slowly, almost tenderly, pensive and wistful. Something was glowing softly in his eyes, something like remembrance, something unlike remembrance. He thought about the burden of dead men, and knew that Malarkey was coming to terms with it. All the NCOs had to, sometime or another.

 _Ah_ , he thought, finally. Malarkey and Lipton now had Hoobler’s blood on their skin, blood that would never wash off now, blood they would bear into the next battle and on the final jump.

 _This is how we carry the dead_.

 

 

vi.

There was a lull in the journey when Carwood Lipton fell asleep in the back of that truck heading for Haguenau. He heard muffled voices of men chatting to each other, the clash of metal against wood, of muddy tracks, of empty roads. The bumpy ride halted several times to allow the men to stretch their legs or vomit out the contents of their stomachs. Lipton had felt the jerk as the truck pulled to an abrupt stop and the cadence of the men stepping up and jumping off. His head lolled upright, almost lazily, but he did not open his eyes.

Lipton was getting more and more tired as the day wore on. He wasn’t sure why, but the roughness in his throat had begun to spread, like a wave of rust that overtook the smooth fittings of his clockwork body and corroded each little gear so that it collapsed on itself from the inside. Everything was subtle, everything winking out of order bit by bit without his realising.

He hadn’t bothered about the rasping quality his voice had taken, nor the weighted headaches that had begun to recur more frequently, neither did he care about the dull and incessant noise ringing in the back of his head that hounded him, but he knew that he was tired. He knew that headaches came, sometimes, from fatigue. He knew sore throats were common in such cold weather with terrible clothing. Shell bursts caused tinnitus. Nothing was wrong.

Everything was wrong.

“…arge… Sergeant. Sergeant Lipton.”

Lipton forced himself to open a bleary eye and he turned his head to meet the gaze of a man out of focus. He was too tired to be able to recognise the voice, so he did the next best thing and forced his throat to work.

“Yeah boy?” His voice was rough and cracked slightly at the end.

“You’re shaking.”

He was. He hadn’t realised it, but his teeth were chattering _hard_. Arms crossed, Lipton had been grasping the edge of his jacket tightly with almost white fingers in hopes of gathering warmth. He was shaking like a leaf, and it was all he could do not to let his voice shudder along.

“I’m cold,” was his reasoning, which he was. The words came out in between his chattering, Lipton vindictive that a sudden wind would pick up at such a terrible time and he wrapped his arms closer, a dull ache knocking against his ribs where his heart must be. He tried to smile at the boy, to be reassuring, but everything hurt. Everything was warped, out of focus. Lipton closed his eyes, head lolling to the side as his breaths came shorter, into tight wheezes. It was hurting more and more, climbing in intensity. His senses were becoming dull, giving everything a dreamlike quality as he heard a totally different voice pipe up for the first time.

“See what I mean, sir? He didn’t even _recognise_ you.”

Less commanding. More youthful.

Lipton shook.

“…All right, Malarkey, all right. The closest hospital we can reach is in Alsace. Until then, you think you can keep him from falling off?”

“He won’t be doing any falling, that I can guarantee, sir.”

There was a pause in which ‘sir’ pondered the choice of words he had been answered with. In the void of conversation, Lipton felt something inside his chest seize up, clench tightly, painfully, and he couldn’t breathe. He began to cough and _god_ it hurt so bad, made him lurch violently and keel over to heave. He could taste blood on his lips, feel grit under his fingernails as he clawed at the floor of the truck for stability, never aware of the hands holding him and trying to smack the devil out of his lungs and stomach as he vomited something that smelled rancid but looked like blood. Having eaten nothing, the one functional part of Lipton’s mind couldn’t help but wonder he was letting out.

Two pairs of hands held him aloft and he fell unconcious almost immediately, with a light echo of a thought before he went reminding him to thank Malarkey and Speirs later for keeping him out of his own vomit.

By the next truck stop, through laboured gasps and a firm hand caressing his brow as he lay on his back in an army jeep, staring watery-eyed at a pair of shining double-bars pinned to a dirt encrusted collar, Lipton finally came to accept that he was very sick.


End file.
